Free Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

lived?”
    “I got to show you this thing,” Enoch said. “I got to show it to you, here, this afternoon.
     I got to.” He gripped Hazel Motes’s arm and Haze shook him off.
    “Did she tell you where they live?” he said again.
    Enoch kept wetting his lips. They were pale except for his fever blister, which was
     purple. “Cert’nly,” he said. “Ain’t she invited me to come to see her and bring my
     mouth organ? I got to show you this thing, then I’ll tell you.”
    “What thing?” Haze muttered.
    “This thing I got to show you,” Enoch said. “Drive straight on ahead and I’ll tell
     you where to stop.”
    “I don’t want to see anything of yours,” Haze Motes said. “I want that address.”
    Enoch didn’t look at Hazel Motes. He looked out the window. “I won’t be able to remember
     it unless you come,” he said. In a minute the car started. Enoch’s blood was beating
     fast. He knew he had to go to the F ROSTY B OTTLE and the zoo before there, and he foresaw a terrible struggle with Hazel Motes. He
     would have to get him there, even if he had to hit him over the head with a rock and
     carry him on his back up to it.
    Enoch’s brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication with his blood
     did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The other part was stocked up
     with all kinds of words and phrases. While the first part was figuring how to get
     Hazel Motes through the F ROSTY B OTTLE and the zoo, the second inquired, “Where’d you git thisyer fine car? You ought to
     paint you some signs on the outside it, like ‘Step-in, baby’—I seen one with that
     on it, then I seen another, said…”
    Hazel Motes’s face might have been cut out of the side of a rock.
    “My daddy once owned a yeller Ford automobile he won on a ticket,” Enoch murmured.
     “It had a roll-top and two aerials and a squirrel tail all come with it. He swapped
     it off. Stop here! Stop here!” he yelled—they were passing the F ROSTY B OTTLE.
    “Where is it?” Hazel Motes said as soon as they were inside. They were in a dark room
     with a counter across the back of it and brown stools like toad stools in front of
     the counter. On the wall facing the door there was a large advertisement for ice cream,
     showing a cow dressed up like a housewife.
    “It ain’t here,” Enoch said. “We have to stop here on the way and get something to
     eat. What you want?”
    “Nothing,” Haze said. He stood stiffly in the middle of the room with his hands in
     his pockets.
    “Well, sit down,” Enoch said. “I have to have a little drink.”
    Something stirred behind the counter and a woman with bobbed hair like a man’s got
     up from a chair where she had been reading the newspaper, and came forward. She looked
     sourly at Enoch. She had on a once-white uniform clotted with brown stains. “What
     you want?” she said in a loud voice, leaning close to his ear. She had a man’s face
     and big muscled arms.
    “I want a chocolate malted milkshake, baby girl,” Enoch said softly. “I want a lot
     of ice cream in it.”
    She turned fiercely from him and glared at Haze.
    “He says he don’t want nothing but to sit down and look at you for a while,” Enoch
     said. “He ain’t hungry but for just to see you.”
    Haze looked woodenly at the woman and she turned her back on him and began mixing
     the milkshake. He sat down on the last stool in the row and started cracking his knuckles.
    Enoch watched him carefully. “I reckon you done changed some,” he said after a few
     minutes.
    Haze got up. “Give me those people’s address. Right now,” he said.
    It came to Enoch in an instant—the police. His face was suddenly suffused with secret
     knowledge. “I reckon you ain’t as uppity as you was last night,” he said. “I reckon
     maybe,” he said, “you ain’t got so much cause now as you had then.” Stole theter automobile,
     he thought.
    Hazel Motes sat back down.
    “Howcome you